///
The door closes behind Mariah, and Cleve sits back down with his notes. After a moment, though, he looks up and waves. Bella drifts across the room to join him. He coos over her a bit—she is such a pretty girl—and gives her a plant snack, then requests, “Hey, just keep an eye on him, and tell me if there’s trouble.” Bella has so far been good at delivering messages, and she’s tracked down Mariah several times before, so this should be right up her alley.
She gives a flash of deep bluish-purple, the color Cleve sometimes sees sparkling in Mariah’s eyes. Then she is gone in a blink, and Cleve lets himself relax… but just a little. First that means cleaning his gun, but once that’s finished, he turns his attention to properly mending the rips and tears that have accumulated in his clothing over the past few months. He’s done some repairs in the field with just needle and thread, but Marina has an actual sewing machine and a basket of spare fabric squares. With these, he sets about reinforcing his earlier work.
It’s a few hours before Bella returns, longer than Cleve would expect for a simple letter delivery. In the interim, Marina has returned from the hospital and set herself up again at her dining room table, surrounded by notes. When the shimmerfly catches Cleve’s attention, she flashes indigo, followed by the gentle waves of rainbow that Cleve has come to recognize as her in a good mood. Moments later, when Mariah comes through the door, Cleve just nods to himself and keeps working. Still alive, he reflects. That’s exactly how I wanted that all to work out. Mariah isn’t mad about Bella following him, and in fact does not even mention it at all, so he probably didn’t notice the tail.
///
When I get back to the apartment, Cleve’s at the sewing machine and Marina’s at the laptop, a cup of what passes for coffee around here beside her. Cleve gives a little nod, but Marina looks up, startled. “Mariah! Oh, did you go out for a walk today?”
“Yeah,” I reply, not taking umbrage at the question. “You remember the farmers we stayed with. They asked us to drop a letter off.”
“Oh, okay. And… you’ve been fine?”
“Yes.” I answer simply and politely.
“Excellent.” She waves me over to join her at the table. “I’ve completed some of the analysis on the serum that Dr. Gupta used.”
“So, do you know what it was trying to do?” I ask.
Marina lets out a puff of breath. “Let me tell you a couple things,” she begins. I raise an eyebrow, not sure how to read her demeanor. “One, to the best of my knowledge, it degrades rapidly, so it should be out of your system by now. So it’s not a long-term concern,” she says, leading with a reassurance. “Two, it was binding with certain particles in your blood in order to, I believe, make the samples she was extracting more potent. There shouldn’t be long-term effects,” she reiterates, “but we don’t know for sure what all the short-term effects were. It was an experimental formula she was trying out to get more potent blood samples—or she could spin it as not as many blood samples would be required for a given potency.”
“Right.” That’s an awfully generous reading, and my voice betrays my skepticism.
“But I think we both know how she would really use it,” Marina says. I nod. That all tracks with the things Dr. Gupta said to me down in the lab. I let out a shaky breath at the memory, and Marina hastens to add, “So you should be medically cleared to do—” She waves her hand. “—chironic things.” Her voice is also a little nervous, as though she’s reluctant to give me a pass when she doesn’t have a complete scientific understanding.
But it sounds to me like she’s got a firm enough grasp on the serum, so I’m glad to have the all-clear. “Okay, well, it’s good that you’ve worked that all out,” I say positively, “because that serum could actually be useful for your work on other people.”
“Yes,” she draws the word out, as though she’s trying to piece together my meaning. “Because I’m going to take care of Checkerboard,” she finally says. “I said I was going to do that; I’m still going to do that,” she assures me.
“I didn’t just mean Checkerboard,” I tell her.
“Is there someone else like you, Mariah?”
“I think there are more people here, in the Garden of Chiron, who have… adjacent capabilities,” I say, choosing my words carefully. Earlier I may have considered cavalierly springing Sal on her, but if my time with Sam showed me anything, it’s that I need to be more compassionate in how I treat Marina.
Dr. Citali grabs a notebook and flips to a fresh page. “What do you mean? We don’t have any records of this.”
“Is there any tradition of annual physicals here? A regimen that children go through?” I ask. “Or is it just that when people need medical treatment, that’s when they go see somebody?”
Marina explains that everyone gets a series of vaccines, but generally only planetfallers get annual physicals. That’s partly because it was something they were used to back on Earth but also because they’re older and tend to have more health concerns. “You are supposed to get your miasma levels checked every five years,” she adds, “but that’s a pretty simple blood test.”
“What I’m suggesting, then, is that maybe people should be getting more complicated blood tests. Now that you’ve seen my blood and what’s in it—and you know better what to look for—I think you might find some of that in more people here than you expect,” I tell her. “And I have talked to somebody who is going to make an appointment with you to be looked at in this regard, as they have… demonstrated some affinity with the planet. I think you will probably find something in their system.”
“Who?”
“Sal,” I say, completely earnest.
Marina’s face goes through a wave of expressions. She pulls out a stick of gum and swiftly pops it in her mouth. “You want me to…? D-d-does Sal agree to this?” she stutters out. “This doesn’t sound like them!”
“Sal wants to understand their connection to this planet. And now that I have talked with them about it, they understand that there might be an actual physiological connection.” Marina still looks skeptical. “Cleve was there,” I say, calling on him for support.
The steady sound of the sewing machine pauses. “Yeah, I suggested it,” he says, looking up from his work. “Seemed like a great idea,” he adds, his tone a mix of sincerity and self-satisfaction. “It just makes sense.”
“If you want to understand how humans can live on this planet, then you need to look for more of these niche cases,” I tell Marina. This is essentially the same argument I made to Sal. But I know how much Marina dislikes them and all they stand for, so I continue, “Sal’s… ideas… about the Child of Chiron are entirely their own. But what they’ve seen that has led them to those… That is real.” Although Marina has witnessed me manipulate resonance fields, I was never comfortable enough to talk to her about potential hallucinations. Now I admit that. “I haven’t told you a lot about what I have seen from this planet, but I’ve seen enough that I believe that those drawings are based on an actual experience.”
“Interesting…” Marina murmurs. She clears her throat and says, “I admit I had written off their ‘prophecies’ as purely creations of a human mind. But if there’s something to it…” She sits up a bit straighter, resolve taking hold of her. “You know, if I can help them understand that there’s a scientific reason behind these things… and help us all understand… then yes. That will be good for all of us. I’ll see them after you leave.”
Perfect. She sounds like she’s convinced herself that this is a smart thing to do. But she is ultimately bound back for Data Haven, and I need to make sure this project continues here even without her. I ask her to network with Dr. Gupta’s research assistants and any other necessary scientists here to put regular testing into place. “Yes,” she agrees. “This would be an excellent research project for some of those junior staff who are going to have to be taking on a lot more roles now. This might even be a good PhD topic for one of them.”